Wednesday, October 22, 2014

A new Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) initiative has been formed by Nokia Networks,Vodafone, IBM, Intel, NTT Docomo and Huawei with the goal of bringing standard compute and storage capabilities into wireless base stations.

The initiative, which is organized as a new European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) Industry Specification Group (ISG), will focus on open architecture and application programming interfaces (APIs) for value creation in mobile multi-vendor environments for a range of computing platforms.

Nokia Networks said this aligns well with its Liquid Applications framework. Recently, the company demonstrated its Liquid Applications with T-Mobile US for low latency vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) services.

“Establishing the MEC initiative with the support of the other stakeholders will create an open multi-vendor environment at the most lucrative point within the mobile network, driving differentiated services, new applications and ultimately new revenues,” said Marc Rouanne, executive vice president, Mobile Broadband at Nokia Networks. “It also builds on our view of fundamentally changing the telecom industry through increasing our collaboration with different players and partners.”

Praveen Akkiraju will continue as CEO of VCE. The company claims over a $2 billion annualized demand run-rate for Vblock and Vblock-related products and services exiting Q3 2014, its sixth consecutive quarter of greater than 50% year-over-year demand growth.

"VCE was created to be a disruptive force by radically transforming and simplifying IT data center architectures, accelerating a shift to cloud computing. It has been a huge success and has changed the conversation with CIOs. VCE's size, scale and market reach now requires a more traditional business structure. Our commitment to increased investment will enable VCE to significantly expand the scale and scope of its solutions, helping customers take better advantage of hybrid cloud and next-generation IT opportunities,” stated Joe Tucci, Chairman and CEO of EMC.

“VCE represents another example of Cisco's strategy of aggressively investing to drive key market transitions. VCE was created to positively disrupt data center architectures utilizing Cisco's UCS and Nexus platforms, and we have been thrilled with the execution, results and customer demand the VCE team has delivered," stated John Chambers, CEO of Cisco.

Earlier this month, VCE introduced new and updated Vblock Systems, including the first all Flash-based model. VCE provides pre-integrated, pre-tested and pre-validated converged infrastructure solutions that are delivered and supported by VCE as a single product.

In August 2014, VCE announced new development efforts at VMworld 2014 for delivering integrated management solutions for the hybrid cloud. Specifically, VCE will integrate its converged infrastructure, Vblock Systems, with VMware vCloud Automation Center and VMware vCenter Operations Suite, and provide technology onramps to VMware vCloud Air, enabling customers with seamless management, workload migration and disaster recovery between their private and public cloud environments. VMware's vCloud Air is an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) public cloud offering that enables an organization to extend its private on-premises IT infrastructure to the public cloud.

IBM and Microsoft agreed to collaborate to provide their respective enterprise software on Microsoft Azure and IBM Cloud.

Key points:

IBM and Microsoft will make key IBM middleware such as WebSphere Liberty, MQ, and DB2 available on Microsoft Azure.

Windows Server and SQL Server will be offered on IBM Cloud.

IBM and Microsoft are working together to deliver a Microsoft .NET runtime for IBM's Bluemix cloud development platform.

To support hybrid cloud deployments, IBM will expand support of its software running on Windows Server Hyper-V, and the companies plan to make IBM Pure Application Service available on Azure.

"Together we are creating new opportunities to drive innovation in hybrid cloud," said Robert LeBlanc, Senior Vice President, Software and Cloud Solutions Group, IBM. "This agreement reinforces IBM's strategy in providing open cloud technology for the enterprise. Clients will now gain unprecedented access to IBM's leading middleware and will have an even greater level of choice over the tools that they use to build and deploy their cloud environments."

"Microsoft is committed to helping enterprise customers realize the tremendous benefits of cloud computing across their own systems, partner clouds and Microsoft Azure," said Scott Guthrie, executive vice president, Cloud and Enterprise, Microsoft.

The new BCM65200 DSP and BCM65900 analog front end VDSL chipset with on-chip vectoring and integrated G.fast support a new state-of-the-art DSP architecture to deliver unmatched levels of integration. Incorporating up to 36 lines of VDSL2 or six lines of G.fast, plus high-speed vector interfaces that eliminate the need for external PHY and framing devices, the BCM65200/900 family delivers the most power-efficient system solution for high-density G.vector DSLAMs as well as new G.fast-based fiber-to-the-distribution point (FTTdp) architectures.

The new chipset also offers full backward-compatibility to existing VDSL and ADSL technologies, including simultaneous G.Fast and G.vector crosstalk cancellation. This enables operators to selectively deploy G.fast to new customers in the same system as VDSL2.

Key features:

28nm process technology

36 ports of VDSL2 17a

VDSL2 power consumption per port reduced up to 30 percent

Multimode and auto-moding support, selectable per channel, simultaneous support of G.fast, G.vector, VDSL2 and ADSL protocols on a per line basis

Support for chip-, board- and system- level vectoring modes

Integrates all 10G-KR vectoring interfaces; lowering bill-of-materials, size and power consumption and providing direct interface to the line cards

"As an industry leader in G.vector and G.fast technologies, Broadcom is supporting the in-progress deployments and trials of operators evaluating cost-effective ways to boost the performance of their broadband services across existing access networks," said Greg Fischer, Broadcom Senior Vice President and General Manager, Broadband Carrier Access. "Worldwide support for G.fast is growing as it enables operators to provide FTTH-like speeds without the cost associated with fiber deployments."

Broadcom already offers a silicon portfolio for residential home gateways, including the BCM63138 with full support for G.fast and G.vector deployments.

AT&T added 2 million wireless users in Q3 while making progress in migrating its existing customer base onto Mobile Share plans and away from unlimited data plans. About 62% of the postpaid customers are now on Mobile Share plans, with more than half on plans sharing 10GB of wireless data per month with family members. The company said its wireless margins have been impacted by strong adoption of Mobile Share Value plans, but that customer satisfaction is increasing.

For the quarter, AT&T reported consolidated revenues of $33.0 billion, up 2.5 percent versus the year-earlier period. Compared with results for the third quarter of 2013, operating expenses were $27.6 billion versus $26.0 billion; operating income was $5.4 billion versus $6.2 billion; and operating income margin was 16.4 percent versus 19.2 percent.

“Our strategy is on track and our investments in giving customers best-in-class service to access content everywhere and on any screen continue to pay off,” said Randall Stephenson, AT&T chairman and CEO. “We had strong subscriber growth in wireless and U-verse, and our strategic business services revenues continued to post double-digit growth.”
Some operational highlights

Wireless

Total wireless revenues, which include equipment sales, were up 4.9 percent year over year to $18.3 billion.

Wireless service revenues were essentially flat in the third quarter at $15.4 billion, and wireless equipment revenues increased 44.3 percent to $2.9 billion as more customers chose equipment installment plans versus subsidized devices.

There was a year-over-year reduction in postpaid service ARPU (average revenues per user); however, ARPU improved when compared to the second quarter of 2014.

There was a third-quarter net increase in total wireless subscribers of 2 million, led by gains in postpaid and connected devices. The company added 785,000 postpaid subscribers, more than twice as many as in the year-ago third quarter.

Revenues from residential customers totaled $5.7 billion, an increase of 3.0 percent versus the third quarter a year ago.

U-verse, which includes high speed Internet, TV and Voice over IP, now represents 64 percent of wireline consumer revenues, up from 54 percent in the year-earlier quarter. Consumer U-verse revenues grew 23.2 percent year over year.

U-verse high speed Internet had a third-quarter net gain of 601,000 subscribers, to reach a total of 12.1 million.

Strategic Business Services

Total revenues from business customers were $8.7 billion, down 2.0 percent versus the year-earlier quarter but stable sequentially.

Overall, declines in legacy products were partially offset by continued double-digit growth in strategic business services. Revenues from these services, the next-generation capabilities that lead AT&T's most advanced business solutions — including VPNs, Ethernet, cloud, hosting, IP conferencing, VoIP, MIS over Ethernet, U-verse and security services — grew 14.3 percent versus the year-earlier quarter.

These services represent an annualized revenue stream of nearly $10 billion and are more than 28 percent of wireline business revenues in the third quarter.

Wind River announced that its high-speed pattern matching software is able to achieve a benchmark of over 36 Gbps on Intel Atom processors and exceeding 280 Gbps on high-end Intel Xeon–based platform.

The Wind River Content Inspection Engine provides the high-speed pattern matching that enables security appliance vendors to scale security performance and intelligence across the network from low-end to high-end platforms. Software pattern matching on Intel architecture enables the optimized performance and scalability needed for resource-intensive Network Function Virtualization (NFV) applications. The Content Inspection Engine, which runs entirely in software, is a high-speed embedded software pattern matching solution that can match large groups of regular expressions against blocks or streams of data. The engine can also search for multiple patterns simultaneously, even when the streams of data are scattered in different memory locations.

Wind River said its Content Inspection Engine, also sold as Hyperscan, now delivers pattern matching throughput of over 36 Gbps on the Intel Atom processor C2000 series, using tier-1 original equipment manufacturer (OEM) IPS patterns to scan real-world HTTP traffic. It is a pattern matching library designed to drop into a vendor’s system software release and be used for an entire product line, without requiring any additional software or hardware resources. With scanning performance on high-end Intel Xeon–based platforms exceeding 280 Gbps, these benchmarks demonstrate Content Inspection Engine’s ability to deliver scalable performance, making it an ideal pattern matching technology for low-end to high-end security platforms and NFV-based solutions.

“These latest benchmarks validate how software can transform processor real estate into scalable security performance,” said Paul Senyshyn, vice president of communication platforms at Wind River. “Wind River Content Inspection Engine delivers streamlined integration and scalability that is compelling for equipment manufacturers. We are encountering considerable traction from customers embracing the benefits of high speed pattern matching, including a steady stream of new evaluations worldwide.”

In September 2013, Intel agreed to acquire Sensory Networks, a start-up which specializes in pattern matching and acceleration software technology, for approximately US$20 million. Sensory Networks developed "HyperScan" high-speed, L4-L7 pattern matching software that accelerates deep packet inspection applications running on Intel processors. The company was founded in Sydney Australia and was headed by Sab Gosal.

In 2012, Sensory reported that its HyperScan library delivers DPI throughput of 160Gbps with linear scalability, based on an intensive benchmark of HyperScan on a dual-socket platform (8-core, 16 threads per socket) using the new Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 family and Intel C604 chipset, scanning against a tier-1 commercial IPS signature set.

“We are pleased with the development of our Q3 2014 revenues of EUR 87.1 million, near the record level seen in the previous quarter, and slightly above guidance. The year-on-year increase of 10.2% is based on stronger enterprise business requiring more and improved high-speed transport networks. This is largely due to continued network traffic growth as a result of the increased adoption of cloud based services. Pro forma operating margin came in at 4.0%, at the upper end of guidance,” commented Jaswir Singh, chief financial officer & chief operating officer of ADVA Optical Networking.

CenturyLink will open a new data center at the Switch SUPERNAP Las Vegas campus. A new agreement between the firms will also ensure Switch customers access to CenturyLink’s global data center footprint and portfolio of colocation, cloud, managed services and network.

CenturyLink currently operates 57 data centers throughout North America, Europe and Asia. Switch is a privately held company based in Las Vegas where it
has a 1.7 million-square-foot data center campus and operates the only Uptime Institute-certified Tier IV Gold carrier-neutral colocation facility in the world.

CenturyLink employs about 700 people in the Las Vegas area and operates a substantial network services business in the region as well.

DragonWave received follow on purchase orders for its Horizon Compact+ from a major Indian telecom and broadband Service Provider. Financial terms were not disclosed.

“We are pleased to have received additional orders from this key Indian customer to further build our their 4G Network,” said DragonWave President and CEO Peter Allen. “India is a very important market and our solutions are ideally placed to deliver cost effective capacity for operators who are modernizing their networks to deliver 4G services.”

Earlier this year, DragonWave announced that Reliance Jio Infocomm, a subsidiary of Reliance Industries Limited (RIL), had selected its packet microwave radio systems for its nationwide 4G/LTE network. DragonWave said it would provide several thousand turnkey Horizon Compact+ links to support traffic backhaul from the LTE network. The deployment will also include services to be delivered by DragonWave’s Indian joint venture, DragonWave HFCL.

Good Technology, which specializes in secure mobility solutions, has acquired Macheen, a mobile cloud application service provider based in Austin, Texas. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Good Technology said the acquisition extends its capabilities to provide customers with embedded corporate data plan support across business-required apps. Split-billing capabilities enable customers to tie data usage costs directly to the apps using that data, reducing regulatory risks associated with traditional mobile billing models.

"As BYOD deployments continue to become mainstream, our customers want to alleviate the risk and cost associated with rapidly increasing mobile regulations, tax liabilities and complexities around mobile reimbursement and corporate stipend programs, while at the same time carriers are looking to better serve their enterprise customers," said Christy Wyatt, chairman and chief executive officer, Good Technology. "By acquiring Macheen and its cloud-based offering, and coupling that with expanded carrier relationships, we will be securely and cost-effectively taking more friction out of deploying secure mobile apps and workflows - further positioning Good ahead of the industry in the race to democratize mobility."

"At Sprint, we have ripped out and replaced our entire 3G network and deployed 4G LTE in 488 cities to deliver a future-proof data experience for our customers," said Karen Freitag, vice president, wholesale and emerging solutions at Sprint. "Adding in the ability to deliver split billing capabilities through Macheen and now Good Technology, allows us to continue delivering a high-quality customer experience and further advances Sprint's position as the leader in enabling Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNO)."